Announcing a Voyage of Historic Discovery

The first port of call will be London, England, in the 1720s, a time when liberty-loving Brits feared the approach of tyranny

The ship “American Commonwealth” sails for ports of the past, where history illuminates the errors and follies of our ways and strategies for recovery

Like many of you, I have been searching for a purpose, a calling, since the fifth of November last.

I am 57 years old. I wish to be of service to my society and democracy. Yet, surveying the landscape of the coming four years, my heart skips a beat, then sinks.

I feel that we, as a democratic people, have failed, and now we are left to wait, watch, and, critically, plan for reform.

Amid dark signs, however, there remains the bright light of history. The intelligence, wisdom, and courage of history. The hope of history.

Look back, for example, at the struggles for liberty in 5th century BCE Greece and Rome to the Glorious Revolution, American Revolution, French Revolution, the Mexican Revolution, the suffragist movement, the civil rights movements—all magnificent eras beckoning us back in time to study, listen, and learn.

Because I find such comfort in history—and, admittedly, to soothe my political melancholia and have a little fun—I am steering this ship called American Commonwealth away from the politics and pundits of today towards far greater intelligences on historical shores.

We are sailing for ports of the past, where we’ll find entertainment, spectacle, and, in eternal gratitude to the preservers of books, pearls of wisdom to prepare us for the next chapter: crisis followed by reform.

And perhaps—I am only half certain—I’ll make a book of it.

Today in the United States we are suffering from a terrible case of ignorance of the vitalizing principles and emotions underlying free government. Only history can dispel this ignorance. Only history can imbue us with the knowledge and fortitude we need to rebuild our republic—or, if it decays, or splits apart, to build a new one.

Only history. What else is there?

Should your children and mine—as well as grandchildren, nieces, nephews, and students at all levels of education—join us on this journey of learning? The question is self-evident. Yes, of course.

Though they may not yet realize it, today’s teens and young adults will be at the forefront of reform. And, without history as their compass, I fear they will not do well.

"Chance favors the prepared mind,” Louis Pasteur once wrote. To rescue the United States’ imperiled democracy, that preparation must come through history.

The first port of call will be London in the year 1720, where we will meet John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, two of the most ingenious political philosophers and guardians of liberty of all time. I have mentioned them once before in these pages.

Cato’s Letters, I submit, is the singular masterwork in the canon of Western history that, standing alone, holds the power to rescue threatened democracies and republics around the world today—provided that citizens absorb their teachings into mind, heart, and marrow.

Trenchard and Gordon, writing anonymously, are the authors of Cato’s Letters, 144 public essays published between 1720 and 1723, first in the London Journal and later in the British Journal.

Collected into four volumes spanning over a thousand pages, Cato’s Letters soon became a cause célèbre, a lodestar of free government.

The explicit aim of Trenchard and Gordon? To defend Britain’s constitutional republic against corruption and tyranny. As they further describe their mission: “To maintain and explain the glorious principles of liberty, and to expose the arts of those who would darken or destroy them.”

British government in those years was indeed a constitutional republic, yet a monarchical constitutional republic, one raised to new heights of liberty by the Glorious Revolution of 1688. As the authors say, that bloodless revolution instituted “the best republick in the world.”

I’ve read Montesquieu, Locke, Hume, Hamilton, Madison, Wollstonecraft, and others. And none of them compares in sheer intelligence and passion of moral conviction with Trenchard and Gordon.

Cato’s Letters, I submit, is the singular masterwork in the canon of Western history that, standing alone, holds the power to rescue threatened democracies and republics around the world today—provided that citizens absorb their teachings into heart, mind, and marrow.

In his 1915 poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot rhapsodizes the pessimism of modernity:

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent . . .
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create . . .
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons . . .
And in short, I was afraid . . .
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all” . . .
I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be . . .
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

My father, a standard-bearer of “the spirit of liberty,” recited stanzas from this poem to me, my brother, and sister at the dining room table—and perhaps at the crib. It was for him a poem about the dark soul of humanity and, therefore, the dark soul of democracy.

Yet he was an optimist—a lawyer and judge buoyed on high by history. And, to my good fortune, history is a gift he handed down to me in a thousand tomes.

History is also the life force that fueled the passions of Trenchard and Gordon in the 1720s.

Here’s a foretaste of the ruthless intellectual analysis and audacity for liberty they bring to us in Cato’s Letters. Of arbitrary power—that is, tyrants who invade and lay waste to free government—the authors profess:

As arbitrary power in a single person has made greater havock in human nature, and thinned mankind more, than all the beasts of prey and all the plagues and earthquakes that ever were; let those men consider what they have to answer for, who would countenance such a monstrous evil in the world, or would oppose those that would oppose it.

The ways and means by which tyrants banish liberty, and how to stop them, is the chief preoccupation of their letters:

A bear, a lion, or a tiger, may now and then pick up single men in a wood, or a desert; an earthquake sometimes may bury a thousand or two inhabitants in the ruins of a town; and the pestilence may once in many years carry off a much greater number:

But a tyrant shall, out of a wanton personal passion, carry fire and sword through a whole continent . . . I say nothing of the moral effect of tyranny; though 'tis certain that ignorance, vice, poverty, and vileness always attend it.

“Despotick power,” the pseudonymous Cato continues, “has defaced the Creation, and laid the world waste.”

Tragically, the 144 essays written by Trenchard and Gordon have been all but lost to modern education. As a result, we suffer a stunted understanding of the Enlightenment, free government, human nature, demagogues, tyrants, checks and balances, and, therefore, the ability to save ourselves.

There was once a thing called the Renaissance—and another, the Enlightenment. We need a revival of both, please, posthaste. Indeed, the time for a Renaissance of History and an Enlightenment of History is now.

The sailing vessel American Commonwealth will weigh anchor on January 14, bound along the Gulf Stream for London in the same year Trenchard and Gordon published their first letter.

I hope you’ll come aboard. With destinations like the coffeehouses of London in the 1720s, the journey promises to be an exciting adventure in learning. And, if we’re struck by a storm along the way, we’ll hold tight to the mast of history together.

In the meantime, amid admittedly dark signs, we’re going to have a little fun.

The ship “American Commonwealth” is embarking upon a voyage of discovery into history

Will you buy a ticket and come aboard?

Eli Merritt is a psychiatrist and historian who writes about the origins of our present political discontents and solutions to them. He has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune, among other publications.

He writes American Commonwealth and is the author or editor of the books “Disunion Among Ourselves: The Perilous Politics of the American Revolution,” “Demagogue in the White House: Lessons Learned from the Presidency of Donald J. Trump,” and “How to Save Democracy: Advice and Inspiration from 95 World Leaders”

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